Into the Mennonite World to Explore One Man’s Test of Faith

Silent Light

Silent Light is set in a Mennonite community in northern Mexico and uses a cast made up mostly of nonprofessionals.Credit
BAC Films International

"Silent Light" was originally reviewed in September when it screened as part of a Carlos Reygadas retrospective at MoMA. It opens Wednesday, January 7, at Film Forum.

The sun floods the wide sky in “Silent Light” like a beacon, spilling over the austere land and illuminating its pale, pale people as if from within. A fictional story about everyday rapture in an isolated Mennonite community in northern Mexico — and performed by a cast of mostly Mennonite nonprofessionals — the film was written, directed and somehow willed into unlikely existence by the extravagantly talented Carlos Reygadas, whose immersion in this exotic world feels so deep and true that it seems like an act of faith.

Mr. Reygadas’s faith may be more rooted in his own gifts than in God, but it’s the sheer intensity of this belief — which he confirms with every camera movement — that invests his film with such feeling. This stubborn, passionate intensity is evident in the mesmerizing, transporting opener, in which the seemingly unmoored camera traces a downward arc across a nearly pitch-black night sky dotted with starry pinpricks. Accompanied by an unsettling chorus of animal cries and screams (what’s going on in there?), the camera descends from its cosmic perch into the brightening world and then, as if parting a curtain, moves through some trees onto a clearing that effectively becomes the stage for the ensuing human drama.

If you haven’t fled for the exits (cowards!), you will be hooked, as much in thrall to the harmonious beauty of the images as to the foreignness of their setting. Yet strange as this world initially seems, with its quiet rhythms and obscure German dialect, its conflicts soon prove familiar: Johan (Cornelio Wall Fehr), a farmer with seven towheaded children and a devoted wife, Esther (the Canadian writer Miriam Toews), has fallen in love with another woman, a neighbor, Marianne (Maria Pankratz). Though tormented by the affair, Johan feels that Marianne is his truer match, the woman who will correct the mistake he made by marrying Esther, whom he also loves and from whom he has, with tragic, unintended cruelty, hidden nothing.

Photo

A scene from "Silent Light" by Carlos Reygadas.Credit
BAC Films International

And so, while Esther waits on the sidelines of their life with her unquiet eyes, tending the children, keeping the house and driving the family tractor, Johan explores the limits of his faith and his faithfulness. He nuzzles Marianne on a windswept hill, yellow flowers bobbing at their feet, and makes sweaty love to her in a small, white room that looks like a chapel. (Afterward, a leaf enigmatically, portentously falls from the ceiling.) He seeks advice from his father (Mr. Wall Fehr’s own father, Peter Wall) and clandestinely finds Marianne’s hand while, in a moment of ordinary surrealism, they watch black-and-white television images of the Belgian chanteur Jacques Brel, drenched in sweat and emotion and warbling about bonbons and l’amour.

I’ve seen “Silent Light” three times — it had its premiere at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival — and find it more pleasurable and touching with each viewing. After having wowed and appalled international audiences with bravura technique in his first feature, “Japón” (2002), and assaultive provocations in his second, “Battle in Heaven” (2005), which opens with the kind of sexual encounter that keeps nunneries in business, Mr. Reygadas has quietly altered his visual style to brilliant and meaningful effect. His silky camera movements and harmoniously balanced widescreen compositions still enthrall, but he now comes across as less committed to his own virtuosity and more invested in finding images — of children bathing, trees rustling, clouds passing — that offer a truer sense of the world than is found in melodramatic bloodletting.

Though “Silent Light” owes a strong, self-conscious debt to Carl Theodor Dreyer’s eccentric 1955 masterpiece, “Ordet,” another story about faith and love, the new film also recalls some of the more pastoral passages in Terrence Malick’s “New World,” yet another tour de force about love and faith (in other people, in the cinematic image). In one of the loveliest sequences in “Silent Light,” Johan’s family idles in and around a creek that serves as its communal bathing pool. As some of the children drift languorously in the water, their bodies modestly covered and blond heads floating like lilies, the parents tenderly wash the younger ones, scrubbing one child’s head with soap, massaging another’s feet with oil and exchanging small endearments and instructions.

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It’s a gorgeous, innocent yet sensuous scene, a glimpse of the prelapsarian with a hint of the viper that Mr. Reygadas closes with a shot of a pink blossom, an image that begins as a blur of color and gently comes into focus. He holds on the image a few beats — much as he often does — not only because, I imagine, he wants us to appreciate its metaphoric resonance but also because he wants us to see its glory. There are a handful of ways to understand the meaning of “Silent Light,” words that I read as an allusion to love, but this is also very much a film about that ordinary light that sometimes still passes through a camera and creates something divine.

SILENT LIGHT

Opens on Wednesday in Manhattan.

Written (in Plautdietsch, or Mennonite Low German, with English subtitles) and directed by Carlos Reygadas; director of photography, Alexis Zabe; edited by Natalia López; art director, Nohemi Gonzalez; produced by Mr. Reygadas and Jaime Romandia. At Film Forum, 209 W Houston St, Manhattan. Running time: 2 hours. This film is not rated.